Unfortunately, no. There are no backups of HPSS. Even if a file is written with "copies=2", the overwrite will affect both files (a recovery might technically be possible, but not without significant system interruption).

The ~ is appended if the user has "autobackup=on" in their .hsirc file. Otherwise, the file is simply overwritten. Another option is to use "hsi cput" instead of "hsi put". Using cput will cause hsi to give a warning message if the file exists. The file that the user is attempting to store won't be written to HPSS, but the old one won't be overwritten. (The user also needs to pay careful attention to the output from hsi so that they'll notice the file wasn't stored.)

This usually happens because the stripe count is too small (often 1). To solve this issue, remove the partially transferred file and change the stripe count of the directory before transferring the file. To change the stripe count of the directory, first cd to that directory. Second, type the following command:

HTAR provides the “-Hverify=option[,option...]” command line option, which causes HTAR to first create the archive file normally, and then to go back and check its work by performing a series of checks on the archive file. You choose the types of checks to be performed by specifying one or more comma-separated options. The options can be either individual items, or the keyword “all”, or a numeric level between 0, 1 or 2. Each numeric level includes all of the checks for lower-valued levels and adds additional checks. The verification options are:

Administrators may disable users for archiving too many small files at a time. Archiving too many small files introduces a lot of overhead on the system, and this archiving system is not designed to handle a lot of small files. Please use htar to tar together your files. Documentation can be found here.

There is nothing that should prevent you from running a script that creates multiple simultaneous connections to HPSS. The HPSS system administrator recommends that you should not create more than 1 or 2 connections at a time. Every time you introduce a new instance, the performance of the overall system is degraded.

If you log into Darter or Nautilus using your passcode from your OTP token, you
can run HSI without entering your passcode each time. You can also run
batch scripts that use HSI in the "hpss" queue. If you logged using GSI authentication you will be prompted for your passcode each time you use HSI.

HPSS performance is greatly improved when the transfer size is between 8 GB and 256 GB. For that reason, users with large numbers of relatively small files should combine those files into one or a few 8 GB to 256 GB files and then transfer the larger files. The files can be combined with tar on the HPC system, or they can be created on the fly with a command similar to tar cvf some_dir -|hsi put - : somedir.tar. This command will tar all files in the some_dir subdirectory into a file named somedir.tar on HPSS.